Why Particle Network

Solving user and liquidity fragmentation through Universal Accounts.

With the blockchain ecosystem transitioning from a monolithic to a modular paradigm, we have witnessed the explosive growth of composable, application-specific blockchains, yielding thousands of new ecosystems.

Modularity enables high-performance, scalable, and customizable blockchain architecture, but at the cost of the self-containment and efficiency of monolithic blockchains. It can be observed that, in a modular multi-chain ecosystem, while the problem of limited block space and flexibility is eliminated, user experience is complex, liquidity is fragmented even further, and the cost of interacting across multiple chains remains high.

For developers, fragmentation results in a separate set of challenges, as user dispersion across multiple chains, high costs, and the cumbersome process of transitioning from chain to chain force them to forego users from specific ecosystems, significantly limiting the growth of their applications.

To tackle these problems, Particle Network has devised a unique strategy to enable chain abstraction through Universal Accounts (powered by the Particle Chain), understanding chain abstraction as the missing piece in the transition between Web3's early and mainstream stages.

Chain abstraction allows Web3's product offering and network effects to radically increase in both quantity and quality. This can foster healthy competition among protocols in terms of products, not user bases. Furthermore, in a chain-abstracted paradigm, protocols can adopt application-specific blockchains at a higher rate without fear of isolating themselves from the rest of the ecosystem.

A fully chain-abstracted experience may look as follows:

• Alice discovers a Play-to-Earn dApp. The dApp is hosted on Arbitrum.

• Alice starts using the dApp. The assets in her wallet (Polygon-native) are used for basic dApp interactions. Bridging is automatic, executed atomically as she plays.

• After playing for a bit, Alice earns some tokens. She uses them to buy an NFT for her friend Bob's birthday. Unbeknownst to her, the NFT is hosted on Optimism. She can seamlessly send it to Bob's Universal Account. Importantly, throughout her whole experience, Alice has only used a single gas token.

• Bob decides to take a loan against the NFT on Solana and use the proceeds to buy a meme Bitcoin Ordinal. He does this in just a few clicks within a few minutes, all through the same account.

Particle Network proposes a system that achieves chain abstraction by acting as a universal settlement layer. It features a Universal Account protocol that synchronizes Smart Accounts across the ecosystem, unifying the UX across all chains and allowing users to have the same account address and balance on all of them. Universal Accounts leverage Particle's Universal Liquidity protocol, allowing users to access any chain with a single account via the automatic execution of cross-chain transactions and swaps. This shared liquidity, in turn, enables them to use any token to pay for gas, ultimately settling on the Particle Chain.

To accelerate chain abstraction, Particle Network is also collaborating closely with other industry players focused on this goal, seeking to establish standards and build upon existing solutions moving in the same direction.